The Crime of Olga Arbyelina

by Andrei Makine

  She stared at the redhead’s mouth as if this mouth had an existence of its own. And her stare ended up by frightening the child. “He didn’t even cry!” he shouted and began to run, unable to bear a moment longer the violence with which those eyes were skinning his lips.

  By the end of the week she was able to bring her son home. His convalescence was a time of silent reunion. Immobility and pain made him a child again. She felt more a mother than ever.

  The night of the first snowfall—that night—formed a vast country of deafness in her mind, that she learned to avoid thinking about and from which only a few sparse fragments came to her. They resembled the strings of air bubbles that are released from time to time by stagnant water. She realized, for example, why that night had taken place on the eve of a Sunday; just like the other one, when she had fallen asleep in the book room. Yes, a Sunday, when an abnormally long sleep could easily take on the appearance of sleeping in…. She also recalled that one of the rare games this taciturn child loved to play at the age of seven or eight consisted of ringing the front doorbell and then hiding, to create the mystery of a missing visitor. Within this prank, she told herself, there was an element, no doubt, of that wait for the return of his father, whose “long trip” never came to an end….

  These memories disturbed her but they did not last. Any more than the fleeting reflex of revulsion she had on seeing her son’s leg, this pale leg from which the plaster had just been removed. The knee and especially the foot were still swollen, and the little row of toes had a childish and strangely equivocal prettiness on this swollen and grayish flesh, on this big man’s foot…. The doctor palpated the foot with sure and precise gestures, reminiscent of those of a craftsman handling a piece of wood. Dry and far from talkative, he seemed to take a certain delight in the terseness of his own comments, from which there was no appeal. “We shall have to operate to straighten the knee,” he explained in a tone designed to avoid all sentimentality. “But we’ll do it later, when he’s had some rest…” The same evening she reread for the thousandth time the pages especially devoted, as it seemed to her, to this very case, to that very day in the life of her son. Reading these books, she often had the absurd impression that their authors knew her child and could foresee the course of his illness. This illusion was singularly powerful that evening, in the lines that she recited mentally, recognizing them from memory from the shape of the paragraphs:

  If the leg is more or less flexed on the thigh this only permits walking on the ball of the foot, which is painful and tiring. The muscles of the lower limb will atrophy….

  That night before going to sleep she called to mind, but in an intensely physical way, the infinite complexity of the years she had lived through, a jumble, without beginning or end, without any logic. The memory of the child was woven into this tangled web, like an exposed vein, burning. She pictured again the pale adolescent in the doctor’s office, putting on his clothes with abrupt haste. She saw his fragile wrists and, when he looked up, the tiny bluish vessels beneath his eyes…. She was unable to stay in bed, went to the window, and with closed eyelids, her forehead pressed against the window, told herself that such was the logic of this painful and chaotic life. And in the spring the boy would be fifteen, if there was a spring for him….

  Then one December evening she noticed the light trace of white powder on the fine film that always formed on her infusion. Astonished by her own calmness, she poured away the liquid, washed the little copper vessel, placed it on the drain board. And, feeling herself observed by all the objects, by the walls, went into her bedroom.

  THE VITALITY WAS ALL IN THE ARCHES of the eyebrows, in the tense line of the mouth. Only this partial image, like a sketch for a death mask—her face—could be seen, lying profiled on the pillow. The body had vanished, swathed in the icy folds of the sheets. And deep down in this absence, buried in its numb whiteness, her heartbeats were like the grating of damp matches.

  What she could see was limited to what was reflected in the long mirror facing the bed. It was tinged with the ruddy glow throbbing in the stove behind its half-open door. In the sleeping depths of the mirror the round enamel face of the clocks great dial stood out clearly. And the hands, traveling backward, marked off this strange reflected time in reverse. She considered the passing of the minutes from back to front with slight irritation. And she was surprised still to be able to think, or to be irritated. She suddenly wanted to understand the logic of this inside-out dial: if it showed a quarter to one in the morning in the mirror, then what in reality …? Her mind plunged with relief into this mathematical glissade. But it turned out to be difficult to guess the time from the position of the hands in the mirror. All at once she felt tormented by one of those whims sometimes imposed by pointless impulses, half caprice, half superstition. It became impossible for her not to turn around, not to look at the dial. She began prying her head up from the pillow…. And at that same instant she saw, still in the dark reflection of the mirror, that a long section of shadow between the door and the jamb was slowly growing broader….

  Her head froze, slightly raised, trapped by her whim of curiosity. She closed her eyes and with infinite slowness began to lower her cheek down toward the hollow left in the pillow. Little by little. Her neck stiffened, supporting a lead weight. Her temple probed the distance still left to travel. This distance seemed vertiginous, as if her head were sinking into a bottomless void. Yet her face already felt hot, as it sensed the warmth of the pillow close at hand, and even recognized the texture of the fabric. And through closed eyelids she sensed that a living presence had appeared in the open doorway and was slowly slipping into the room, modifying its volume, the familiar relationships between objects, and even, one might have said, the regular sound of the clock.

  The bedroom was filled with the viscous silence of nocturnal rooms where a slow coupling is taking place; or, indeed, a murder; or even the meticulous work needed to eradicate the traces of a murder. It was the numbness of a room, where in the depths of the night bodies are going through the motions of an erotic, or criminal, dumb show.

  When her temple finally touched the pillow her eyelashes blinked involuntarily. And this was her last clear perception during the whole night: at the end of the room the long, dark overcoat opened on a naked body, a white body, slim. It did not look like any other body; it did not look like a body at all; it did not look like anything she had ever seen in her life….

  Her eyelids were closed again, as if in death. Her face, half buried in the burning down of the pillow. Her body nonexistent. Outside her there was nothing but the purple darkness into which the whole bedroom dissolved, that merged into the darkness outside the windows.

  It was in this sanguine ink that suddenly the outline, at once burning and frozen, of a shoulder manifested itself, then that of a woman’s breast. And the point of the breast—firm, taut. Another sinuous curve was swiftly felt, that of the arm and a moment later that of the hip. It was neither a sensation nor a caress. It could have been a raindrop making this fleeting trace along her skin….

  The line suddenly broke off. There was a rapid movement of air, a whirlwind crossing the bedroom. A slight creak of the door closing told her that she was hearing again. Against her skin, under her skin, she now felt the carnal sketch of an unknown body, an outline poignant in its unfinished beauty.

  She fell asleep when the windows were already beginning to turn pale. She woke up again at once. And explained to herself very calmly—only a momentary plunge into despair took her breath away—why he had fled. He must have noticed an unaccustomed tautness in her sleeping body, in its too perfect lethargy…. He had snatched up his coat and rushed to the door. And with his hand on the handle he had lived through that momentary but appalling dilemma known to all criminals: to flee or to return to cover your tracks at the risk of being done for. He had gone back toward the bed, had covered up the inert body with a blanket, had straightened out the slippers that he had kicked aside in his f
light….

  Criminal… She repeated it ceaselessly during that sleepless night. Criminal was the silence she had kept. Her acceptance. Her resignation. Criminal too, the nakedness of the youth, concealed beneath a man’s long overcoat. Criminal that whole night …

  And yet there was something false about those menacing syllables. Something “too clever,” she thought. Crime, perversion, monstrousness, sin … She caught herself seeking out ever more punishing words. But the words merely seemed as if written on the page of a book. Typographical symbols devoid of life.

  In the morning she noticed that this time the curtains were open (during the first night they had remained drawn). The day was gray and windy (that other awakening had been to sunlight)…. She sensed that these parallels concealed a fearsome truth that would be revealed to her at any minute now. A physical, corporeal truth that gripped the muscles of her stomach, rose up to her heart and closed over it, like a hand around a bunch of grapes in the tangle of leaves.

  The truth that the words repeated throughout the night did not suffice to tell.

  There were no longer any words but these things that offered themselves to her gaze with their mystery, with a mysterious smile almost. The cold smile of one who already knows the secret. The curtains; the lamp with its great orange shade lording it on the bedside shelf; the well-worn slippers, comfortable to her feet but suddenly unfamiliar; the door handle … struck by an inspiration, she opened the wardrobe, rummaged among several garments on their coat hangers, took out the black dress, her only remaining elegant outfit. Its pleats, its neckline trimmed with silk braid … The dress, too, was silently telling a secret that was about to burst forth….

  She went out into the corridor, this time with no fear. And as all the objects seemed to want to confide in her, the big cardboard box on top of the old closet caught her eye. For years now, when dusting or repainting the walls, she had wondered what it could contain and had then forgotten about it until she came to clean again…. She pulled up a stool, drew the box toward her, opened it. The thing it contained turned out to be strangely solitary, like a relic at the heart of a shrine. It was a plaster cast, no doubt one of the first of those she had made for her son, something he had learned to fashion for himself while still very young. This one was of such a small size that at first glance she did not know if the plaster had been shaped around a leg or an arm. Of course, it was a child’s leg and she recognized the touching delicacy of its shape…. She put the cast back in the box and closed it; then unable to curb her desire, seized the plaster mold again, pressed it to her cheek, her lips. And it was then that the secret rang out: “Incest!”

  The word shattered into a number of memories, each one earlier than the last. They reverberated in the night of the first snow and even before that night. During the night when the sleeping draft had not worked. And even earlier, when for the first time she had surprised that young stranger beside the kitchen range. And even further back than that in her memories. That old overcoat of her husband’s on the youth’s naked body. The previous winter she had darned it and, seeing it on her son’s shoulders, had had to make a rapid, strenuous effort not to think about her husband’s body…. And her unique evening dress. And the unique opportunity for wearing it— the evenings when L.M. took her to the theater. She would arrive at Li’s house and entrust the boy to her and begin to make herself ready. When she went out, dressed, with her hair up and perfumed, her neck and shoulders very pale, the boy observed her with an insistent and hostile look. That made her laugh. She embraced him, enveloping him in her perfume, ruffling his hair and tickling his ear with her warm voice, imitating a lover’s voice, which is, in its turn, an imitation of the voice we use in speaking to children…. And there were also the slippers. As quite a young child he had put them on one day for fun when she was still in bed and gone out into the corridor making the soles clatter on the floor. She had protested feebly; he had not obeyed her. She had been overwhelmed by an acute pleasure, that of feeling herself tenderly dominated, of not knowing how to or wanting to resist….

  Pushing the box back onto the top of the closet she climbed down from the stool. Now it had all been said. There was nothing else to understand. She knew everything, even that: the word “incest” had already resounded within her but in such cavernous depths of her mind that, surfacing into speech, it had been transmuted into “crime,” “monstrousness,” “horror.” Like those deep sea fish which, drawn to the surface, explode or transform themselves into an unrecognizable lump of flesh.

  Even the rhythmic spasm that her final discovery had provoked in her was from now on familiar to her. The hand that arose in the pit of her stomach, pressed on her lungs, taking her breath away; gripped her heart, a bunch of grapes that the hand either squeezed or released, at every thought, then suddenly crushed until there was a red hot throbbing in her temples.

  She knew equally that all the means of salvation she had imagined in fact only added up to one. To break the curse of those nights she must both flee and remain; explain herself and above all say nothing; change her life and continue as if nothing had happened; both die and live while forbidding herself all thought of death.

  “During the first night the curtains were drawn, during the second, open,” she recalled for no reason. Yes, the reason for it was her headlong flight forward, proof that she was already living the life where one could neither live nor die.

  It was with the feeling of embarking on this new life, a step at a time, that Olga drank her tea, left a note for her son, and went out, as she did every Sunday morning. She walked through the streets of the lower town, gray streets, their pavements strewn with tiny granules of snow. Without admitting it to herself she was hoping for a sign, a jolt in this provincial calm that might have attested to the irremediable yet utterly mundane deformation of her life. A woman who lived at the Caravanserai appeared at the end of the street, drew level with her, and, after greeting her, asked,”Are you going to Paris?”

  “No, I was going for a walk …”

  Olga waited for the street to become empty again, then turned toward the station.

  In the train, watching the dismal fields and the little towns devoid of life floating past, her heart like a crushed bunch of grapes, she repeated several times, “Enough said. Impossible to live. Impossible to die …”

  The train stopped for a few minutes in a little station beyond which there arose the sad, dull houses of a village similar to Villiers-la-Forêt but rendered even more inanimate by this cold, windy day. The only thing that attracted her eye was a window squeezed into the recess of a tiny yard. All around was the network of the alleyways, the naive jumble of doors, roofs, overhanging top stories: and then this window, lit by the feeble light of one bulb, with its Sunday-morning calm….

  A sudden intuition struck Olga; she turned away. So somewhere in this world there could be a place where what she had to live through could be lived! A life beyond “Enough said.” A secret life, inaccessible to others. Like the one hidden behind the window that a distracted passenger on a train had just noticed.

  As she was emerging from the Metro in Paris she felt the tiredness and the nervous exhaustion of the past weeks catching up with her. The steps of the staircase suddenly gave way under her feet; she clung to the rail. And with half-closed eyes she heard a plaintive, almost childish voice within her begging, “Please make Li understand! If only she can guess everything and tell me what to do. If I can just have a moment of peace….” As she resumed her journey she recognized in this tone close to tears the old familiar voice of the “little bitch.”

  “When we were at school before the revolution, you remember the plank the headmistress made them tie to the backs of the girls with stooping shoulders, so they held themselves straight. You could tell them a mile off, the poor crucified things, with their shoulders square and their backs straight…. And then one fine day no more planks! The newspapers talked about liberty and emancipation….”

  She wa
s trying to explain to Li the feeling that had been an unconscious element in all her thoughts since adolescence. The feeling that one day life had lost all its rectitude, correctness, regularity. One day a strange whim had crept into their lives in Russia, into the whole country. Suddenly they had been seized with the desire to prove that this rectitude was no more than a chimera, a shopkeeper’s prejudice. And that one could live disregarding it, or, better still, thumbing one’s nose at it. Furthermore, life itself seemed to confirm this: a Siberian peasant appointed and dismissed ministers; he “purified” (as he called these couplings) the Tsarina’s ladies-in-waiting and even, according to malicious tongues, the Tsarina herself—all of them being in thrall to his inexhaustible carnal drive. Newspapers portrayed the Tsar as an enormous oval pair of buttocks surmounted by a crown. Killing a policeman became an exploit in the name of liberty…. And then one day they had stopped strapping planks to the backs of stooping schoolgirls.

  In explaining this Olga suddenly believed she could understand herself. Yes, once the planks had been removed everything in the country collapsed. In her memory it was the recollection of a purely physical slackening. For a time to be twisted and ungainly had become quite the fashion…. In the very spring when their backs had been liberated she had taken part in a masked ball for the first time. Walking down a corridor (the portrait of her grandmother had been hung upside down) she had come upon a man and a woman coupling in an armchair. And like millions and millions of people at that time she had discovered that a certain order of things was cracking apart, on the brink of crumbling, or indeed that there was no order, no rectitude, merely servile custom binding them (like the plank at your back) to laws that were said to be natural…. Later she found herself listening to the poet who fixed bear’s claws to his fingers. Another poet claimed he drank champagne from the skull of his suicidal beloved. And then there was that patron of the arts who commissioned an icon portraying a huge naked succubus….